Month: January 2013

Today on the Dish, Andrew reframed the gun-control debate to give some meaning to the term “pro-life.” He meditated on the role of language in our attitudes on immigration, rebutted Douthat on the origins of America’s liberal sexual mores, and laughed off more of the stale arguments for DOMA. Andrew also recoiled at the nasty desperation of the anti-Hagelians, scoffed at McCain’s and Butters’ performance in today’s confirmation hearing, and shook his head at Hagel’s own flip-flop toward the hawkish line. He glimpsed the sketchier side of the Boy Scouts’ founder and dismissed the pseudo-cultural criticism of Breitbart’s disciples.

Andrew also answered more questions from readers about the new, ad-free Dish coming Monday, whose subscriptions have been gaining momentum lately (a trend you can contribute to  here.)

In political coverage, Larison gauged Rubio’s angle in the push for immigration reform, Barro tracked GOP maneuverings on gay marriage, and we asked whether the Republicans can pacify their Tea Party caucus. A reader made the case for keeping the military’s draft program as Ilya Somin reviewed the legal history of the male-only system. Amanda Marcotte fumed over a conservative organization of pro-gun gals while Ackerman profiled the typical American mass murderer. Jacob Sullum parsed a new poll on America’s anti-prohibition majority and readers stayed on top of the unfolding Boy Scouts ban on gay membership. Meanwhile, Laura Seay colored herself unimpressed by the media’s Mali analysis, we worried about the simmering tensions in the China seas, and Eli Valley gave a crash course on real anti-Semitism.

In miscellanea, Mark Oppenheimer mapped his road back to pot smoking now that he’s a father, Eli Lake had second thoughts about his beloved e-cigarettes, and E.D. Hirsch contended that building vocabulary is the key to fostering literary youngsters. We listened to the moving story of a reader who refused to conceal his HIV+ status and assessed Netflix’s business model of instant gratification. Elsewhere, we wondered if algorithms could put fact-checkers out of business and fancied slapping our smartphones onto our wrists.

We showcased anthem for the nutritionally challenged in the MHB, watched the sun come out in Long Beach, California, and made eye-contact with an Israeli boy who breathed behind a gas mask in the Face of the Day.

– B.J.

(Photos of Dish readers provided by them)

I was reminded of a few key things today. The first is that the Republican party in Washington has no regrets about the Iraq War. McCain and Butters reveled in the same utter certainty of their moral and strategic high ground today as they did in the run-up to the worst foreign policy mistake since Vietnam, after the worst national security lapse since Pearl Harbor. Sure, we were so negligent we allowed more than 3,000 innocents to be mass-murdered not far from where I am typing this; yes, we reacted to the atrocity by bungling the search for the actual culprits, brutally torturing countless suspects (some to death), and then starting a second war on false grounds that cost a trillion dollars and tens of thousands of American and Iraqi lives. But you, Mr Hagel, were wrong about the surge!

He wasn’t, as I have long argued. The promise of the surge was to buy enough time and peace to get the sectarian mess of post-Saddam Iraq to resolve itself peacefully and form a viable non-sectarian polity. That hasn’t happened. What we have is a Shiite authoritarian government in open conflict with both the Sunnis and the Kurds – and greater Iranian influence in the country. The surge did dampen some violence, but the collapse in mass murder was more a result of a political decision by the Anbar tribes to turn against the Sunni extremists, exhaustion after a long period of ethnic cleansing and segregation, and American money to bribe away the rest. It was a face-saver for a war that had manifestly failed.

Then there is Hagel’s heresy on the question of Israel. Although he is, like most of us, a supporter of the Jewish state, he recoiled in the Senate at the way in which the Greater Israel Lobby choreographs the voting. He just refused to do the necessary grand plié whenever AIPAC’s emissaries came with their bills and resolutions to be rubber-stamped by the Senate. He dared to think outside the box of American foreign policy options called “What The Israeli Far Right Wants”.

He even at one point raised the possibility – are you sitting down? – of containment in foreign policy, the doctrine that guided the Cold War for generations. This puts him waaay outside the mainstream that gave us the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It made him, in James Inhofe’s view, a virtual emissary of the Revolutionary Guards or in Ted Cruz’s fetid brain, an ally of Jihadism. But if you are McCain and Graham and go to a foreign country, Israel, and on foreign soil, side with that country’s prime minister in a diplomatic showdown with your own US president, you are fine and dandy, and any implication that they might be putting another country’s interests above your own is a disgusting anti-Semitic slur. But if you are a Nebraskan war hero who dares to think about containment, rather than a new cycle in a global religious war, you are effectively called an Iranian double-agent in the Senate itself:

“Why do you think the Iranian foreign ministry so strongly supports your nomination to be the Secretary of Defense?”

John Avlon is rightly incensed by this disgusting insinuation – and the whole fracas. But the Senate GOP does not surprise. Even after the catastrophes in Iraq and Afghanistan, neoconservatism in its most paranoid and aggressive form still reigns supreme. We won both wars; we never tortured anyone; there is no such thing as the Greater Israel Lobby and it never intimidates anyone and has never defended any dumb idea (like settling half a million Israelis in a conquered territory). And the proof that the fever still has not broken was Hagel’s dreadful, inarticulate surrender on anything he had ever thought or said. Or as Weigel so delicately put it today:

Lindsey Graham had wanted to know who had ever been spooked by The Lobby and what stupid things they’d done out of panic. The answer was right in front of him, at the witness table.

In the end, they all give in. Or have to pretend to.

Logo beats CNN in prime time …

Dish readers are some of the best storytellers:

Like you, I have been both openly gay and HIV+ positive for decades.  I have never concealed my orientation, but I had told only a very close circle of gay friends about my HIV status.  I’m not sure why I was so reticent with straight friends, but I think mostly it was fear of being shunned and treated differently (having to wear a bell).

Then, I fell in love … with the newborn son of a coworker and close friend. He brought the week-old baby into our office, and proudly slipped him into my arms.  While his father worked for an hour, I fed Henry a bottle, rocked him in my arms, and held him against my chest while he took a long nap.  And I was hooked – the feel of his fingers holding mine, the smell of his scalp, his soft snoring as he napped.  I visited the young family as often as I could, and both parents seemed comfortable with me handling Henry. I soon fell into the role of babysitter/gay uncle, and the feel and smell of carrying a spit-up blanket on my shoulder quickly became normal.  I was flattered by their level of trust in me; it was something my parent’s generation could never imagine.

Several weeks after Henry started day care, his dad asked me if I would come to the day-care center to sign up as an emergency contact and surrogate caretaker. I was happy to sign the forms, but it also made me realize that they were formally entrusting me with their greatest treasure, and I decided that I needed to be fully honest with them about my HIV status. Some day they would find out that I was positive, and I didn’t want them to feel that I was deceiving them.

I told the father first. I’m not good at reading emotions, but he was obviously uncomfortable and shocked. I assured him that my viral load was undetectable, and that I would never do anything that would endanger his son. He was very quiet, and said that he would have to tell his wife, and that they would discuss it that evening.  That night, I slept only a few hours.

They invited me over the next evening. Walking up to their front door, I steeled myself for a long, difficult conversation. When the door opened, Dad handed Henry to me and said “Henry needs somebody to play with while I fix dinner … come on in.”

Thank you for giving me the confidence to come out fully to them; I have never felt more trusted and loved. And best wishes for your new venture; I’ve signed up, and am encouraging friends to do so.

Ilya Somin reviews previous SCOTUS rulings on the question:

In the 1981 case of Rostker v. Goldberg, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of male-only draft registration in part because women were barred from combat roles, and female draftees are therefore less valuable to the military than male ones would be. In the thirty years since then, more and more combat roles have been opened up to women, and the Pentagon’s most recent decision is likely to eliminate most if not all remaining gender-based restrictions. So that rationale for a male-only draft is undercut.

But then-Justice William Rehnquist’s majority opinion also relied heavily the courts’ “lack of competence” on national security issues and the consequent need for “healthy deference to legislative and executive judgments in the area of military affairs.” That deference might justify upholding male-only draft registration even if all or most combat positions are open to women. The federal government could argue that, in the expert judgment of the military, few women have the strength and endurance needed for many combat positions, even if they are not categorically barred from them. Thus, female draftees might still be less useful to the military than male ones. A court applying “healthy deference” might choose not to contest that assertion.

Amanda Marcotte rails against the Independent Women’s Forum, a conservative group making the case that guns are an “equalizer” that enhance women’s safety:

The fact of the matter is that more guns put women in danger. The Harvard Injury Control Research Center has found that states with more guns have more female violent deaths. Their research also found that batterers who owned guns liked to use them
to scare and control their victims, and would often use the gun to
threaten the victim, threaten her pets or loved ones, clean them
menacingly during arguments, or even fire them to scare her. The
Violence Policy Center’s research showed that in 1998, the year they
studied, 83 women were killed by an intimate partner for every woman who used a gun in self-defense. Futures Without Violence compiled the statistics
and found that guns generally make domestic violence worse, both by
increasing the likelihood of murder and also by creating situations
where abuse is more violent, controlling, and traumatic.

(Photo: Joanna Baginska, a fourth grade teacher at Odyssey Charter School in American Fork, Utah, is shown how to handle a 40 cal. Sig Sauer by firearm instructor Clark Aposhian at a concealed-weapons training class to 200 Utah teachers on December 27, 2012 in West Valley City, Utah. By George Frey/Getty Images.)

Eli Lake recounts his love affair with electronic cigarettes:

I could smoke when I wanted and I didn’t have to destroy my lungs, sinuses and circulatory system in the process. My clothes wouldn’t smell like a dive bar. I found the loophole, cheated cancer and rediscovered the pleasure of martinis. The added bonus with electronic cigarettes was I could smoke them anywhere. On freezing days, there was no need to huddle outside the office for four minutes to suck down my dose. I smoked on airplanes, in meetings and at restaurants. It was like a time machine to the golden age of smoking when there were ashtrays on elevators and in movie theaters.

He’s less sure of them now that he’s looked into the medical research:

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Besides the nicotine, the other active ingredient in my cigarettes is propylene glycol, a substance the FDA classifies as GRAS, or “generally recognized as safe.” But there’s a catch. Most research about propylene glycol is about its effect when it’s ingested as an additive in food. Less is known about the effects of inhaling it as a vapor—dozens and
dozens of times a day. … Dr. Lowell Dale, the medical director of the Mayo Clinic’s Tobacco Quitline, was far more incendiary. Propylene glycol as a liquid, he told me, is “similar to anti-freeze.”

He’s getting lots of pushback from defenders of e-cigs in the comments section.

Chait views immigration reform as “the biggest test case of whether the party leadership, such as it is, can bend the activists to their will”:

[T]he party’s ability to make this decision stick will be a test of its ability to wrest control from the activists. One constant and somewhat unusual dynamic of the last few years is the degree to which Republican base activists — grassroots ones, not the ones based in Washington — were able to bend the party to their will. They repeatedly nominated ultraconservatives in Senate races over Establishment favorites. They dragged out the presidential campaign and forced Romney to endorse draconian positions, especially on immigration, that hurt him dearly.

Ambers bets that GOP base will eventually rebel.